Welcome to the Print and Play Hideaway, your go-to destination for everything Print and Play (PnP)! Whether you're new to PnP or a seasoned crafter, we offer tips on crafting your own games, reviews of the best PnP titles, and playthroughs to help you dive into the world of print and play, along with other PnP-related content. Join us as we explore innovative PnP game designs, share helpful tutorials, and celebrate the boundless creativity of the PnP community.
Hello Martin, in the items list I can't see the trasparent sheets to laminate (matt, reflective, thickness) thank you, your channel is awesome. Just discovered and inscribed
This is going to be a long one, so strap in. But for anyone who wants to get into this hobby, this is the man right here. Words cannot express how thankful I am for your advice. I started about 8 months ago. Me and a group of peers have a tradition where we play Uno every Thursday night. It can get pretty heated and competitive. We even have a trophy for the person who wins that week. But when we switched over to the *Uno No Mercy* version, we found it extremely unbalanced, frustrating, and unfair to play. That led to me taking over game night sessions, calculating and optimizing the game, adding mechanics that I thought would be fun. The group ended up loving it. You know where I'm going with this-that's where I first got the card game bug. What better thing to do than to create my own game? I’m a graphic designer, after all. How hard could it be? . . . Well, my first attempt is honestly embarrassing to even mention here. I used thick 50pt chipboard for the core and this really nice linen paper for the front. I wanted to go all in. But the material started warping, the spray adhesive I used was tacky, and everything just went wrong. The material was so thick and in hindsight I don't know what I was thinking. This is my second attempt, and for the past few weeks, I've been driven crazy. First, the guillotine cutter .It was a disaster. No matter how straight I tried to cut, I’d end up with slanted, uneven edges. The bottom of the card would look like someone took a blunt knife to it. I’ve now ordered the paper trimmer you recommended, and I’m looking forward to finally getting precise cuts and seeing what I'm doing properly. Second, printing. No matter how much I adjusted my designs in Canva, no matter what settings I used or how I tweaked the PDF, I could never get a perfect alignment. Sometimes it was just a little off, but other times it was a complete nightmare. Although not perfect, manually feeding has helped a lot especially with the thick cardstock I'm using (fun fact, I'm using the same printer you did the HP officejet pro 9018E) Third, lamination. I used a nice matte lamination sheet-3 mil thick-and a super cheap laminator I found on Amazon. It only has three settings: hot, off, and cold. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to go through all that work, corner cutting and laminating, only to find that the sheets would peel right off because I cut too close to the edge. I saw your video about using higher heat to fuse the material, so I ordered a new laminator, and it’s arriving tomorrow. I’m really excited to give it another shot. Finally, the corner cutter I was using was a $6 bare-bones, plastic thing. It didn’t cut all the way through most of the time, and it left jagged edges on what few cards did turn out well. It was extremely frustrating. But I’ve got a better corner cutter coming now, and I’m optimistic that it’ll solve the issue. All my new materials are arriving tomorrow, and I’ll keep you updated! But there have been so many times while watching your videos that I’d run into a problem and think, “Wait… oh my gosh, that makes complete sense!” So, from the bottom of my heart-thank you
Good info on printer comparisons. Ive been more concerned with finding a new one that prints very well and clearly , for making game parts, boards,etc but also has good deep color saturation that sets well, (Also getting a model that doesn't run out of ink every ten pages) i hadnt even been thinking of alignment issue. Lol I guess i had thought a good one i wouldnt have to worry about it ,as i just thought i had to make sure i set up the pages right in the program, so now ive got another issue to consider when trying to decide what printer to get. I just havnt had time to do research on forums seeing what others tended to recommend for this kind of purpose. Thanks
Hi Martin! Per the Koala Photo Paper listing, they state that it is only compatible with Dye ink, and not Pigment ink. I'm having a hard time finding a printer that utilizes Black Dye ink. What model printer are you using with this paper? Thank you!
@@zapster1984 I’m using an HP Smart Tank 7300 with great results. Prior to this, just a couple of months ago, I was using an HP Officejet Pro 9018, also with excellent results.
@@PnPHideaway Gotcha! Based on some research it appears that your printers utilize Black Pigment-based ink and Color Dye-based ink, which is identical to the printers I've found. I am glad to hear you had good results with this. I assume that Koala Paper's warning on pigment-based inks is a result of pigment-based COLOR inks that result in smudging. Since it's only the black ink, and we are laminating after printing, my concerns are now lowered. Thank you!
Great info Martin! You have an awesome channel for the PNP hobby. I have used various Epson printers and they all have the same alignment issue, they tend to be about 1mm offset. On one of your videos you were trimming your paper to improve the alignment and it has mostly worked for me. The reason why it worked is because of automatic duplexing, the printer picks up the paper and feeds it into the printer and finds that edge of the paper to locate where the printing should start. It then feeds the paper around the roller and prints the image and feeds out of the printer. That first edge of the paper that comes out is the edge the printer located off of first, when the paper is almost out the printer stops then feeds the paper back in to locate on the new edge then feeds around the roller and starts printing. So with automatic duplexing the printer is locating off of two opposite edges for each image. Now when you look at the page in the light you may see how much it's out of alignment and if you measure the length of the paper it will be too long by about the same amount. This is because the paper we buy is typically over sized so if I do automatic duplexing then I will measure the paper and trim it as close to the size it should be and I will get mostly good results. I can still get some twisting that will mess with the alignment and that may be from not getting a perfectly square edge or just the way the printer picked up the paper. Ultimately Manual two sided printing should be the way to go because you will always locate off the same edge for each side of the paper and the factory edge should be pretty good as long as you can keep the twisting to the minimum. Thanks for taking so much of your time to teach us all that you do.
I just heard Martin mention about this group in the last most recent vid and i didnt know about it. I really need to take time to go study up more on this stuff because i have a huge backlog of older games i want to fabricate from files ive found on BGG. I just dont get enough time anymore to do the stuff i really want to do. I wish i could just stop working for a year and catchup with all kinds of things i would like to do. Im hoping this winter i can have more indoors time to do crafting. But i have a ton of work to do on my house renovations and 200 other repairs and maintenance projects.
I went at this hobby completely backwards. I've got a laminator (and laminating sheets), a self-healing cutting mat, long metal ruler, rotary cutter, and a paper trimmer... but I don't have a printer yet! (Although I have used my local UPS store to print some stuff out.)
Great video. Now I'll have to upgrade my Fiskers cutter. May I suggest you try out the 'Gorilla Heavy Duty Spray Glue'. Odor is no problem and the nozzle is a lot better. It's my current go to.
@@ronaldbharvey Nope, sorry, I don’t have personal experience with printers that gracefully handle anything over 65 lb. paper thickness. If I need to print on thicker paper, I just print to thinner paper and glue it to thick backing material.
Will definitely have to look at PnP Buddy. I wouldn't mind a shift of a couple of mm, but most times my alignments are off by 1/2" or more. And I think that's more to do with most of the PnP PDFs that I get more than anything else. I appreciate the video and the tips.
Ive got the laminator & the basic Fiskars cutter & a rounder. Now just need to get a printer & some paper and i can finally dive head first down this rabbit hole! 😂
This is the video you need to watch if you do PNP and are right about the 3M 77 glue price outside the U.S. Holly is that stuff expensive in my country.
I bought the Kadomaru corner rounder on probably your rec and it's so good. I used to use the hand-held Fiskars 3-in-1 but it was extremely terrible because the blade wasn't stationary, you switched between the sized by turning them.
My tips: - Manual Duplex with the rear feed tray: do both front and back from the rear feed. This means the paper will start in the same place. Don't print the first side out of the lower tray/cassette, then the second with the rear feed tray. - Clean your printer. If it's old, if you leave the top feed open, if you live in a dusty environment, if it's too near your kitchen, or if you have pets, especially, the rollers will get gummed up or dusty or both. If you use fancy or weird papers, they can leave either clay dust or extra ink behind. Cleaning rollers with a non-linting cloth and alcohol can make a big difference. - Before you go to PnPbuddy, make sure that your results are consistent - i.e. that alignment is off by the same amount in the same direction(s) every page you print. Older printers were remarkably inconsistent in feed, and ones which are dirty (see above) will have sufficient slippage to make the feed inconsistent. Probably very cheap printers are also poor at this. If the alignment is inconsistent from one page to the next, PnPbuddy won't really help you. (But with a well made and maintained printer that lacks tracking adjustment, it's the bees knees.) - Both in rear feed trays and in cassettes/lower trays/drawers, there is usually a guide or two that let you adjust to different sizes of paper. These need to be set very carefully to just lightly touch both sides of the paper, so there is no drag, but also no wiggle room for the paper to get pulled diagonally or just slip off to the side. - With specialty papers especially, you will find that not all A4 papers are precisely the same size. (Same goes for letter size of course.) This means that if you've got really good adjustments and more or less perfect results that have worked for you for many projects with one brand of paper, you might blithely print a whole deck of cards on a new brand of paper, only to realize they didn't align, because the paper is actually a little wider or longer. The differences are rarely as much as half a millimeter, but I have seen much more than that once recently, in a major brand of paper. And depending on your setup and alignment options, any error introduced from mis-sized paper may be doubled in the process of duplex printing. US sizes of paper produced overseas may be more likely to be wrong, and different from one manufacturer to the next, because of metric conversions.
With my prototypes (so not PNP and not applicable) I've started to print the backs using an ancient hack: tiling patterns! If you make a pattern that tiles *and* is an exact fraction in height and an extract fraction in width of a card size (and you cut without space between cards), you can have any amount of misalignment and still have completely identical and completely fine backs *per sheet*. Each card back would have the exact same misalignment and the exact same pattern on a single sheet. In this method, you also cut using the front side of the cards so the fronts are perfect, and the backs don't matter.
Great tips! It's nice seeing the new studio! One thing I also do is cut on the backs (or whatever side is more important to be aligned) so that the alignment doesn't have to be perfect. I like how your frustration level lowered when your alignment improved. We need a graph of alignment vs frustration level 😆
I have a Canon PIXMA G3260, and the absolute best alignment I have gotten is using the rear feed (it only has a rear feed), slide the paper guides nice and tight, and ONLY have the page I'm printing on in the feed tray. More than that and the pages begin to slide on each other, resulting in pretty chaotic results. I'm just in the process of building Grimm World, and after printing everything, no page is more than the width of the printed crosshair lines out. Very pleased.
@tradtke101 I made a video about it on my channel but it's all in Turkish. You can check Rainbow Rumble WIP topic on BGG 54 card competition to see one of them.
@@PnPHideaway thank you soo much ive been going back and forth on how to design the cards at the house and this saved the day im already putting all this stuff in my cart. If you have the time what printer would you recommend if you had to pick any other printer or would you keep the same one you have
@@Mpulseieve I was happy with my HP Officejet Pro 9018 for the last 3+ years. I just recently replaced it with the HP Smart Tank 7300. Image quality is great. Front-back alignment is a consistent 2mm offset on the X-axis. I use the web site PnPbuddy.com to adjust the alignment of my PnP PDFs to achieve good front-back alignment.
@@PnPHideaway I looked at that one and it says it only supports up to 28lbs paper weight. You’ve said you’ve had no issues though? I’m assuming you’re still using the 65lb paper. Thank you so much for the replies btw I’ve been doing research for a week on card printing process I have to print 130 cards per deck so I gotta make sure it’s right lol
@@Mpulseieve I’m now using Koala brand 48lb matte presentation paper. Paper weights can be very confusing because the same thickness of paper can have different basis weights. Bottom line, I’m using light cardstock thickness paper in my HP Smart Tank printer.
